Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Links for 7/7/10

The General Educational Development (GED)… minimal value of the certificate in terms of labor market outcomes… Although the GED establishes cognitive equivalence on one measure of scholastic aptitude, recipients still face limited opportunity due to deficits in noncognitive skills such as persistence, motivation and reliability…

[AG: Just in case it’s not obvious why I’m including this one, it is because this is the same screening/signaling/sorting function that distorts simple comparisons of wages for college vs. high school graduates.]

Some time this fall, the U.S. Education Department will publish a report that documents the death of tenure…

the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted… dropping below one-third. If you add graduate teaching assistants to the mix, those with some kind of tenure status represent a mere quarter of all instructors…

The prominent shift in the makeup of the professoriate didn't occur overnight. It happened gradually, without any public endorsement or stated plan, as the byproduct of other concerns—primarily budget shortfalls and administrators' interest in gaining flexibility…